Evening in Byzantium

by Irwin Shaw

  “Calm down, you say. You’re her father. Are you calm?” Patty strode over and stood close to him as though he didn’t trust any message that Craig might give or receive and wanted to hear everything that was said with his own ears.

  When the operator at Wadleigh’s hotel answered, Craig said, “Monsieur Wadleigh, s’il vous plaît.”

  “Monsieur Wadleigh n’est pas là,” the operator said.

  “What’s she saying?” Patty asked loudly.

  Craig waved to him to be quiet. “Vous êtes sûre, madame?”

  “Oui, oui,” the operator said impatiently, “il est parti.”

  “Parti ou sorti, madame?”

  “Parti, parti,” the operator said, her voice rising. “Il est parti hier matin.”

  “A-t-il laissé une adresse?”

  “Non, monsieur, non! Rien! Rien!” by now the woman was shouting. The Festival was abrasive for hotel operators’ nerves. The line went dead.

  “What was all that about?” Patty demanded.

  Craig took a deep breath. “Wadleigh checked out yesterday morning. He didn’t leave any forwarding address. There’s your French lesson for the day.”

  “Now, what are you going to do?” Patty demanded. He looked as though he was going to hit something. Probably me, Craig thought.

  “I’m going to finish packing my bags,” he said, “and I’m going to pay my bill, and I’m going to drive to the airport, and I’m going to take a plane for New York.”

  “You’re not going to look for her?” Patty asked incredulously.

  “No.”

  “What kind of father are you, anyway?”

  “I guess I’m the kind of father it’s necessary to be these days,” Craig said.

  “If I was her father, I’d track him down and kill the bastard with my bare hands,” Patty said.

  “I guess we have different notions about fatherhood, Bayard,” Craig said.

  “It’s your fault, Mr. Craig,” Patty said bitterly. “You corrupted her. The life you live. Throwing money around as though it grew on trees. Running after young girls—don’t think I don’t know about that Gail McKinnon chick—”

  “That’s enough of that, Bayard,” Craig said. “I know I can’t throw you out of here personally, but I can get the police to do it for me. And even a very small French policeman can make things very uncomfortable for a very large young American.”

  “You don’t have to threaten me, Mr. Craig, I’m going. Don’t worry about that. I’m disgusted. With you and your daughter.” He started to leave, then wheeled around. “I just want to ask you one question. Are you happy she’s gone off with that old fart?”

  “No,” Craig said, “I’m not happy. Not at all happy.” At the moment he didn’t think it was necessary to remind Patty that Ian Wadleigh was quite a few years younger than Jesse Craig. “And I’m sorry for you, Bayard. I really am. And I think the best thing for you to do is take Anne’s advice and forget about her.”

  “Forget about her.” Patty shook his head sorrowfully. “That’s easy to say. Forget about her. I’m not going to be able to do it, Mr. Craig. I know myself. I just won’t be able. I don’t know if I’ll be able to live without her.” His face contorted, and he was shaken by an enormous sob. “How do you like that,” he said in a small voice. “I’m crying.” He almost ran out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Craig passed his hand wearily over his eyes. He had looked at himself closely while shaving, and he knew that he didn’t look much better than Patty this morning. “The son of a bitch,” he said aloud. “The miserable son of a bitch.” He was not speaking of Bayard Patty.

  He went into the bedroom and resumed his packing.

  His plane would be an hour late in leaving, the man at the check-in counter told him. The man said it graciously, as though he were bestowing a gift on Craig. Sixty minutes extra of the civilization of France. Craig went over to the telegraph desk and sent an apologetic telegram to Constance. He was writing out a cable to his secretary in New York telling her to meet him at Kennedy and get him a hotel reservation when he heard Gail’s voice saying, “Good morning.”

  He turned. She was standing beside him. She was wearing the blue polo shirt, the white, hip-hugging jeans. Her face was hidden behind dark green sunglasses, uselessly large, like the ones she had worn the first morning and then thrown out of the car on the way back from Antibes. Perhaps she bought them by the dozen.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Seeing a friend off,” she said, smiling. She took off the sunglasses, twirled them carelessly. She was fresh and clear-eyed. She might just have come from a dip in the sea. She was a perfect advertisement for the benefits of marijuana. “The concierge told me when your plane was leaving,” she said. “You don’t have much time.”

  “The concierge was wrong. The plane’s an hour late,” Craig said.

  “One precious hour.” Her tone was mocking. “Good old Air France,” she said. “Always time for farewell. Do we get a drink?”

  “If you want,” he said. Leaving was going to be more difficult than he had expected. He fought down the impulse to go over to the check-in counter and reclaim his luggage and tell the man there he had changed his mind about traveling. He gave the cable to the man behind the desk and paid. Carrying a leather envelope with the script of The Three Horizons in it and with a raincoat over his arm, he started toward the staircase up to the bar. He was sorry Gail had come. Seeing her there after the scene with Patty eroded the memory of their night together. He walked swiftly, but Gail kept up with him easily.

  “You look funny,” Gail said.

  “I had an unusual night.”

  “I don’t mean that. It’s just that I’ve never seen you with a hat on before.”

  “I only wear a hat when I travel,” he said. “It always seems to be raining everywhere when I get off a plane.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said. “It adds other facets to your character. Disturbing facets. It makes you look more like everybody else.”

  He stopped walking. “I think we said good-by last night better than we can possibly do this morning,” he said.

  “I agree,” she said calmly. “Ordinarily, I hate fraying away from people in waiting rooms and on train platforms. It’s like old tired rubber bands stretching and stretching. But this is a special occasion. Wouldn’t you say so?”

  “I would say so.” They started walking again.

  They went out to the balcony overlooking the field and sat at a small table. He ordered a bottle of champagne. Just a few days before he had sat on the same balcony waiting for his daughter to arrive. She had arrived. He remembered the copy of Education Sentimentale falling out of the canvas bag. He remembered being annoyed at the unattractive way she was dressed. He sighed. Gail, sitting across from him, did not ask him why he sighed.

  When the waiter came with the champagne, Gail said, “That should do us for an hour.”

  “I thought you didn’t drink until nightfall,” he said.

  “It looks pretty dark out there to me,” she said.

  They drank in silence, looking across the concrete to the blue sea at the field’s edge. A ketch, heeling over in the wind, all sails taut, foamed through its bow wave on its way toward Italy.

  “Holiday country,” Gail said. “Will you sail away with me?”

  “Maybe some other time,” he said.

  She nodded. “Some other time.”

  “Before I go—” He poured himself some more champagne—“you have to answer one question. What was all that about your mother?”

  “Ah, my mother,” Gail said. “I guess you have a right to ask. My mother is a woman of many interests.” She twirled the stem of her glass absently and stared out at the white sails beyond the landing strip. “She went to art school for a while, she dabbled in pottery, she directed plays for a little theatre group, she studied Russian for a year, she took a Yugoslav ballet dancer as a lover for six months. One of the th
ings that she wasn’t interested in was my father. He had a merchant’s soul, she told him, whatever that is. Another thing she wasn’t interested in, it turned out, was me.”

  “She sounds like hundreds of women I’ve met in the course of my life,” Craig said. “What did she have to do with me? I was never a Yugoslav ballet dancer.”

  “May I have some more wine, please?” Gail offered her glass. He filled it. The smooth muscles of her throat moved almost imperceptibly as she lifted her chin. He remembered kissing her throat. “She worked for you once. A long time ago. If I know my mother, you went to bed with her.”

  “Even if I did,” he said angrily, “don’t make it sound like incest.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think of it that way at all,” Gail said calmly. “I thought it was just a private joke. Between me and me. Don’t worry, dear, I’m not your daughter.”

  “It never occurred to me that you were,” he said. On the tarmac below a group of mechanics were working ominously on the undercarriage of the plane that was to fly him to New York. Perhaps he would never leave French soil. Or die on it. Gail sat across from him, lounging, aggravatingly at ease. “All right,” he said, “what was her name, and when did she work for me?”

  “Her name was Gloria. Gloria Talbot. Does that mean anything to you?”

  He thought hard, then shook his head. “No.”

  “I suppose not. She only worked for you for a month or two. When your first play went on. She was just out of college, and she was hanging around the theatre, and she got a job in your office doing the scrapbooks, pasting up reviews and publicity stories about you and the people in the play.”

  “Good God, Gail,” Craig said, “I must have hired and fired five hundred women since then.”

  “I’m sure,” she said calmly. “But you seem to have had a special effect on dear old Mums. She just happened never to stop the good work. I don’t imagine any of the other five hundred ladies got married and then continued to keep a scrapbook with every word written about you and every picture ever printed of you from 1946 to 1964. ‘Jesse Craig to present new play by Edward Brenner this season. Jesse Craig signs one-picture deal with Metro. Jesse Craig to be married tomorrow. Photograph of Jesse Craig and wife leaving for Europe. Jesse Craig to …’”

  “Enough,” he said. “I get the idea.” He shook his head wonderingly. “What would she want to do that for?”

  “I never got a chance to ask her. Her loyalties were tangled, perhaps. I only came across all the clippings after she’d run off. When I was sixteen. With an archaeologist. I get postcards from Turkey, Mexico. Places like that. Twenty-two volumes bound in leather. In the attic. She was in such a hurry, she only packed an overnight bag. My father was only away for two days, and she had to move fast. I was cleaning out the attic—my father decided he didn’t like the house anymore, and we were moving—when I came across them. Many’s the happy hour I spent after that rummaging through the history of Jesse Craig.” Gail smiled crookedly.

  “That’s how you knew so much about me.”

  “That’s how. Do you want to know where you spent the summer of 1951? Do you want to know what The New York Times said about you on December 11, 1959? Ask me. I’ll tell you.”

  “I’d rather not know,” Craig said. “So you took it for granted that I’d had an affair with your mother because of all that?”

  “If you knew my mother,” Gail said, “you’d know it would be natural to take it for granted. Especially for a romantic sixteen-year-old girl sitting in an attic with her mother off in the wilderness someplace with an archaeologist. If you want, I can send you a picture of her to refresh your memory. People say I look like her when she was my age.”

  “I don’t need any picture,” Craig said. “I don’t know what sort of life you think I led as a young man …”

  “You led an enviable life. I’ve seen the expression on your face in the photographs.”

  “Perhaps. But one of the enviable things about me at that time was that I was in love with the woman I later married, and I believed she was in love with me, and I never looked at anybody else all that time. And no matter what it may seem like to you after this week, I’ve never been a promiscuous man, and I certainly remember the names of all the ladies I’ve ever …”

  “Will you remember mine in twenty years?” Gail asked, smiling.

  “I promise.”

  “Good. Now you know why I was so keen on seeing you when I found out you were in Cannes. I’d grown up with you. In a manner of speaking.”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “It was a sentimental reunion. You were a part of my family. Also in a manner of speaking.” She reached over and poured some champagne for herself. “Even if you never touched my mother and never even knew her name, you had some sort of weird permanent effect on her. She was obviously fascinated with your life. And just as obviously dissatisfied with her own. And in some foolish way one thing was connected to the other. You can’t really blame me if I began to look on you with some disfavor. And curiosity. Finally, I knew I had to meet you. Somehow. Remember I was only sixteen.”

  “You’re not sixteen now.”

  “No, I’m not. I’ll tell you the truth—I was offended by you. You were too successful. Everything turned out too well for you. You were always in the right places. You were always surrounded by the right people. You lived in a bath of praise. You never seemed to say the wrong thing. As you got older, you never even got fat in your pictures …”

  “Newspaper handouts, for God’s sake!” He gestured impatiently. “What could that possibly have to do with reality?”

  “That’s all I knew about you, remember,” she said, “until I walked into your room. It was all such an awful contrast with my foolish mother, with her pottery and her Yugoslav and my father, scraping away at a miserable living in a dingy office in Philadelphia. First, I wanted to see what you were like. Then I wanted to do you as much harm as I could. I made a pretty good start, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did. And now …?”

  There was the silvery tinkle of the public address system and a woman’s voice announcing that passengers were to board immediately for the flight to New York. Miraculously, the group of mechanics around the plane had disappeared. Gail reached over and touched the back of his hand lightly. “And now I think you’d better go down and get on your plane.”

  He paid, and they walked past the bar and down the steps to the main hall. He stopped as they came up to the passport control booth. “Am I going to see you again?” he asked.

  “If you come to London. There will be complications, of course.”

  He nodded. “Of course.” He tried to smile. “Next time you write to your mother,” he said, “give her my regards.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said. She dug in her bag. “I have something for you.” She pulled out a thick envelope. “The concierge gave it to me when I said I was going to see you off. It came just after you left.”

  He took the envelope. He recognized Anne’s handwriting. The letter bore a Nice postmark. He looked up at Gail as he stuffed the envelope in his pocket. “You know about Anne?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We had a long discussion.”

  “Did you try to stop her?”

  “No.”

  “Why not, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I was hardly in the position to.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He put his hands on her arms, pulled her toward him, kissed her briefly. “Good-by,” he said.

  “Good-by, my true love,” she said.

  He watched her stride brusquely toward the exit of the terminal, her bag swinging from her shoulder, her long hair streaming brightly behind her and every man she passed looking hard at her. He saw that she took out the sunglasses and put them on as she approached the door. He felt bruised and old. They were announcing the departure of his plane as he went through the passport gate. He touched the bulk of Anne’s letter in his pocket. Reading matter for th
e Atlantic.

  A decorously dressed tall African with tribal scars and his pretty buxom wife, swathed in gorgeously colored silks, were the only other passengers in first class with him. Craig always felt guilty about paying for first class on airplanes and always paid. The African and his wife were speaking in a language he couldn’t understand. He hoped they spoke no English or French. He didn’t want to talk to anyone before he reached New York. The man smiled politely at him. He half-smiled in return, a rigidity of the lips, and looked out the window. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility, he thought, that twenty years from now they would meet again, perhaps in the final confrontation between the races, and the man, or his son or daughter, would say, “I remember you. You were the white traveler who refused the smile of friendship offered in the plane at Nice. You are a racist colonial, and I condemn you to die.”

  You were the helpless addition of the accidental and unconsidered moments of your history. Unknowing, you impinged upon the population of your past. Carelessly, you made a joke about a man you had never met—oblivious of his existence, you took his mistress to dinner—for the rest of his life he did what he could to harm you. A silly, stage-struck girl wandered into your office and was hired by your secretary and was a vague, nameless presence in the background for a month or two when you were a young man. More than twenty years later you suffered—profited from?—the consequences of the acts, or the non-acts, of your early manhood. Nothing was lost, nothing forgotten. The man who had devised the first computer had merely organized the principle of inexorable memory into a circuit of wires and electrical impulses. Unnoticed passers-by noted your orbits, punched their private indestructible cards. For better or worse you were on file, the information was stored for eventual use. There was no escape. The process was perpetual. What would Sidney Green say about him among the unpaid-for boiserie in the Sixteenth Arrondissement? What would David Teichman’s final instructions be concerning Jesse Craig before he died? How would Natalie Sorel refer to him in the mansions of Texas? What would be the reaction of Gail McKinnon’s daughter upon hearing his name when she was twenty?